Drag queen farce sparkles

This remarkable drag-queen play with music, based on real-life characters and casting light on Second World War East Enders, offers serious, bawdy amusement. Songs like I Want A Boy and If My Fanny Could Talk set the salacious mood. Diamond looks rather rough-cut, needs cutting and reshaping, with rewrites of Steve Hill's bland keyboard score. Yet I know few contemporary musicals with such a strong, amusing or poignant sense of social purpose.

Linda Wilkinson's Diamond was inspired by her book Watercress But No Sandwiches, and sets three narratives running in parallel, until coalescing in the finale's devastating surprise. All action happens in an East End bar, with photographic back-projections of bombed streets and a warship artfullyextending the focus and intensifying the atmosphere. A fatal air raid, shades of terrorism today, reminds how deprived of shelters the East Enders were.

Dave Lynn's b e a u t i f u l ly observed Diamond Lil, an improper cockney tranvestite and lavatory cleaner, a pseudo-lady in dress and peroxide blonde wig, struts her ridiculous stuff. Wilkinson reveals the strain and violent pains of being a 1940s drag queen. Lil and John Barr's marginally more masculine and promiscuous Maisie, who aims to get into the Marines but makes do with the Navy revels in barbed, queenly manners and dresses. A tart with a heart, the far too ladylike Cassandra Compton, who falls for a GI, and a present-day American researching into the East End, with Eileen Page and Avril Elgar playing old cockneys to perfection, draw the narrative strands together. Diamond, if Christopher G Sandford's production was repolished, could be West End bound.

Until 8 July. Information: 020 7226 1916.

Diamond